Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.0 Benchmarks

There's been a number of individuals and organizations asking us about benchmarks of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.0, which was released earlier this month and we had benchmarked beta versions of RHEL6 in past months. For those interested in benchmarks of Red Hat's flagship Linux operating system, here are some of our initial benchmarks comparing the official release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.0 to Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.5, openSUSE, Ubuntu, and Debian.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.0 is equipped with the Linux 2.6.32 kernel (2.6.32-71.el6.x86_64), GNOME 2.28.2 desktop, X.Org Server 1.7.7, xf86-video-ati 6.13.0, Mesa 7.7.1, GCC 4.4.4, and it now uses an EXT4 file-system by default than EXT3 in past versions of RHEL. This is in comparison to Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.5 with the Linux 2.6.18 kernel (2.6.18-194.el5), GNOME 2.16.0, X.Org 7.1.1, Mesa 6.5.1, GCC 4.1.2, and EXT3. On the Debian side, 6.0 "Squeeze" is carrying the Linux 2.6.32 kernel as well, GNOME 2.30.2 desktop, X.Org Server 1.7.7, xf86-video-ati 6.13.1, Mesa 7.7.1, GCC 4.4.5 and it uses EXT3 by default. Ubuntu 10.04.1 LTS has the Linux 2.6.32 kernel, GNOME 2.30.2, X.Org Server 1.7.6, xf86-video-ati 6.13.0, GCC 4.4.3, and an EXT4 file-system. Lastly, openSUSE 11.3 provides the Linux 2.6.32 kernel, GNOME 2.30.0, X.Org Server 1.8.0, xf86-video-ati 6.13.0, Mesa 7.8.2, and GCC 4.5.0.

For running through some Phoronix Test Suite benchmarks across these Linux distributions, we used two different systems for now. One system boasted dual AMD Quad-Core Opteron 2384 CPUs (eight cores @ 2.70GHz), a Tyan S2932 motherboard with NVIDIA MCP55 chipset, 4GB of DDR2 ECC Registered memory, a 160GB Western Digital WD1600YS-01S hard drive, and an ATI FirePro V8800 graphics card. The other system was lower-end just providing an Intel Core i5 750 CPU (quad-core @ 2.67GHz base frequency), an ECS P55H-A motherboard, 4GB of DDR3 system memory, a 500GB Western Digital WD5000AADS-0 Serial ATA hard drive, and an ATI Radeon HD 5770 graphics card.

Tests for this benchmarking of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.0 performance included Apache, PostMark, C-Ray, POV-Ray, Smallpt, 7-Zip, LZMA, Parallel BZIP2, FFmpeg, LAME MP3 encoding, NAS Parallel Benchmarks, GraphicsMagick, Himeno, HMMer, and MAFFT. All testing was done with the stock OS packages using the 64-bit Linux installations.